this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Showerthoughts
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I would rather stop at a gas station, fill up my tank which takes like two minutes, pay and be on my way.
I 100% Guarantee you that EV owners spend less time charging their cars than you do getting gas. You don’t have a gas station in your garage (or destination chargers at work, shopping centers, hotels, parking garages etc) that add range to your car while you’re doing literally anything else. You also don’t start every day with a full tank. These destination chargers in parking lots etc are often FREE.
DC fast chargers are only used when you need to travel 200+ miles away. Which isn’t very often.
Example: With the amount that I drive I would need to go out of my way once per week to get gas. This would be conservatively 15 minutes to get to the gas station, pump the gas, and get back on track. With 52 weeks in a year that is about 12-13 hours spent pumping gas into my car. When I get home I plug in my EV and walk away, its fully charged by morning. I spent 0 minutes fuelling it. With occasional road trips I need to use superchargers about 10 times per year at 20 minutes each. ~3 hours vs 13. You would need to fast charge about 50 times per year to start to break even. At 200 miles of range each charge that means you would need to be driving 10,000 miles per year above your normal around-town and commute habits for this to make sense. Like needing to drive straight from NY to LA and back twice every year.
This is a terrible argument against electric cars that needs to die.
EV owners really need to stop being elitist snobs to people who may not live like them. We do not all live in affluent urban settings with free plentiful chargers, never driving any distance. This classist combative attitude never convinces anyone that an EV is better or will serve their needs.
In this case it was the gas car driver who had the smug and snotty attitude and the EV driver merely disabusing them of flawed assumptions.
Hot swappable EV batteries would be cool
Exists, Nio does it and is steadily expanding the network, but with how fast the 800v cars are charging it’s not really a problem anymore. I took longer breaks on roadtrips than my ev needs to charge even when I still drove a diesel.
If the battery is not easily swappable, then your green EV is a rolling pile of premature waste by design. Not intended to be drivable for 20 years, living a long life on the used car market (as is common with ICE cars), but instead diverting prematurely to waste in a nicely profitable way.
Actually, the batteries are proving to be extremely reliable, to the point that they’re likely to outlast the rest of the vehicle. On average, batteries with 100,000 miles are still at 90% of their initial capacity. The situation will only get better as solid state batteries are rolled out
I am really looking forward to those new battery developments. I still think the EV industry needs to focus on serviceability. I strongly believe in right to repair, and vehicles that are designed to require disassembling most of the car to replace a battery is simply anti-consumer design philosophy.
I don’t think this really caught on because not everyone takes care of their batteries to the same degree. Frequently charging to 100% or draining to 0% has some negative impacts reducing range and performance. You’re likely to receive one of these used batteries in your car with a swap.
Imagine doing an engine swap on an ICE vehicle with a used one that never had an oil change.
But you could swap whenever. Bad battery? Swap it.
The real difficulty is making the process work across multiple vehicles, making it safe and making it less of a pain than DC charging.
This is what is needed. Serviceable by design, with ease.
Roadways that charge your vehicle as you drive on them would be even cooler
Imagine a vehicle that’s fully autonomous, always connected to power, and can carry more than 4-6 people at a time.
You could allocate lanes specifically for it, too, so it could go super-fast.
We wouldn’t need nearly as much parking, so you could push things closer together and be able to walk to places, and have parks…
Man, that’d be cool. I bet if it ever becomes possible, America will be the first to do it at scale. It would be such a technological and societal advantage, we’d be dumb to not use it to its fullest potential.
Edit:
If only it existed! We could call it a RAIN, for how it cascades people upon a location like rainfall. Or maybe to clarify that it’s for transportation… a T-RAIN? Man, if only… /s
At first read I thought you meant swap vehicles while traveling. With how auto manufacturers are moving towards subscription-based models, I wouldn't be surprised if something like that becomes an option. $700/month hot-swappable Ford Fiesta EV's. Drive one in, take another out, carry on your route.
Or just turn every road into a railroad and switch out cars for trains.
Choot choot!
I think this would be the way to go. The infrastructure with gas stations or petrol stations as we call them here in the UK.
Gasoline is based.
I like the smell of gas. Its impact on the environment, not so much.
I know better not to smell gas. Climate change is not man made.
Oh you’re one of those, ew